These American Idiots Get An F- In Their Own History- Thanks To Republicans (VIDEO)

When media analyst Mark Dice asked several Americans about U.S. History, he found out just how little most younger people know about their country. He asked them a number of questions regarding the Declaration of Independence, who our Founding Fatherswere (just to stump them further, he included Jesse Ventura and John Wilkes Booth), and what country we fought in order to gain our independence.

While Dice himself is a rather controversial guy, this video is funny, yet at the same time alarming and sad. Nearly every person he quizzed was completely ignorant of how America became America.

But you can’t blame these American idiots for not knowing U.S. History

When five million students returned to public schools in Texas last fall, they were not taught about the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. Their new social studies textbooks were based on academic standards that barely even touched on racial segregation.

What about the Civil War? These new textbooks tell them that the war was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery,”— they were deliberately written in this order to make it look as if slavery was only a secondary issue that drove the war, at the behest of some members of the state board of education.

Pat Hardy, a Republican member of the board when it adopted these standards in 2010, says that slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War.”

“There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

Hardy’s argument has been used again and again by Southern apologists who wish to defend the treasonous atrocities committed by the Confederacy, Michael Stone notes in Patheos. He notes that Hardy and others try to say that the Civil war really was about “states’ rights,” but neglect the glaring fact that the “states’ rights” issue of the Civil War was based on a state’s right to enable the cruel practice of slavery.

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And the KKK, which even now has a membership of 5,000-8,000, terrorized black people in the South after the war ended, and has continued to do this, tormenting Catholics in the 1920s and black people once again in the 1960s. It has served as a vessel for angry whites to promote racial hatred and their dream of a “white Christian nation.” But their “dream” is a nightmare for the rest of us, and It’s heinous to omit this, because it doesn’t teach kids about the struggle and sacrifices made by others in the making of this country.

This is merely the latest episode of a minority of Christian extremists trying to edit American history to enforce their religious myths and foist a false narrative on children in Texas.

And it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

They’ve also tried to edit American history by promoting textbooks that promote the incredibly dumb assertion that the Founding Fathers relied on the Bible to write the Constitution. They also tried to insist that the American system of Democracy was based on Moses.

And they want to get rid of the “icky” parts of U.S. history

In February. 2015, an Oklahoma-based legislative committee voted overwhelmingly to ban the teaching of Advanced Placement U.S. History classes. Douchebag, er, I mean, Republican Dan Fisher, who introduced the bill said state funds should not be used for teaching the course. College students can take the course to receive college credit, but Fisher says he thinks it emphasizes “what is bad about America” and characterizes the U.S. as a “nation of oppressors and exploiters.” He wants to replace the nationally used and college-recognized AP curriculum which is studied by hundreds of thousands of high school kids each year, with a generic substitute. That would cost the state an estimated $3.8 million.

Welcome to the world of “I don’t want to read this, so no one else is going either.”

This nonsense isn’t just happening in Texas and Oklahoma. It’s also going on in South Carolina, North Carolina and Colorado. Here, policymakers have also tried to scrap or “revise” the AP course due to it’s “liberal bias” and purported focus on U.S. “blemishes.” The Republican National Committee has also called on Congress to withhold funding from the College Board, the nonprofit that developed the course. That’s because this AP course “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”

Sometimes the truth hurts, and these people don’t like that.

A local school board in Colorado promoted revamping the AP curriculum so that it would “not encourage or condone civil disorder [or] social strife,” because oh my goodness, who wants that? (Sarcasm intended). So some students bravely decided to demonstrate how civil disorder and social strife are actually virtues, and they did this by peacefully demonstrating.

Shannon Speed is a Chickasaw tribal citizen and the Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s found that exactly none of her students have been taught anything about Native American history, including how Native Americans were treated after Europeans arrived. Her students start her classes thinking that the U.S. was all wide-open spaces and that the few people that were there helped the Pilgrims with a harvest and then celebrated a huge feast. After a few battles here and there with settlers, Native Americans somehow just vanished.

And the board, she notes, wants to keep it that way.

She writes:

“The United States expanded by systematically eliminating Native Americans from under official policies and acts of Congress with names like “removal,” “reorganization,” “termination,” and “relocation.” Millions died, and many millions of acres of their lands were taken from them to serve the advancing settlers. Ideologies of white racial superiority were widespread from colony through the early 20th century and were regularly and openly offered as the justification for these harms as necessary to the civilizing mission.

“These are historical facts. These events and dynamics shaped our country. And they should be taught to our students.”

She’s completely right. This is what happened in the U.S., and students have a right to know. After all, it also helps some of us take pride in our heritage — and be proud of the role we played in the history of this country. Which is fitting, after all, since Independence Day is right around the corner.

But so many Republicans don’t want us to do that. They want us to drink their Kool-Aid.

Megan was born and raised in Ventura, California. She has since lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Mexico, and Costa Rica. While she has always been a liberal, her travels have informed her politics. She has worked for more than 25 years as a professional journalist writing about crime, the police, local politics, feature stories, environmental issues and a variety of other topics. She now writes for Reverb Press.

Megan supports Black Lives Matter and fights against racism, sexism, the corporatocracy, climate change deniers and others who continue to destroy the planet.